Weekly Mailbag #6 - Q&A here and the pod!

The conversation expands, answering your questions not only here on Substack, but also on the podcast, with a special new weekly Q&A episode every Friday -- in addition to the main episode on Tuesdays

Welcome to the weekly mailbag Q&A! There has been such a wonderful response to these posts that I’m going to expand them — answering a bunch of questions here on Thursdays and also now dropping a special weekly Q&A episode of the podcast on Fridays. So as always make sure to leave your questions in the comments!

Speaking of the pod, it now drops every Tuesday morning. It’s now at #2 in government on Apple (!!!) and we’re also building up a bigger audience on Spotify. This week: the anatomy of a failure, as we examine the entire set of years of mistakes by Cy Vance, Alvin Bragg, and others, leading up to Donald Trump only getting a slap on the wrist at his sentencing in the Manhattan criminal case on Friday.

On to the questions!

A mail truck from 1958, per the USPS website. They should totally bring these back.

Tracy Barnett: What are your thoughts about Trump undermining the constitution and getting rid of it?

There are specific circumventions he can attempt, like abusing recess appointments (which are supposed to be used only in narrow urgent situations, like, say, replacing a national security official who suddenly has a heart attack right as we’re facing an armed conflict). Then there are the frontal assaults against the Republic itself, such as attempting to adjourn Congress entirely, or declaring a national state of emergency and martial law, so he could claim to be suspending the Constitution and all normal civil law.

If these occur, we will need to be ready with court challenges. And we will have to hope that enough members of Congress — even Republicans — so greatly resent having their power stripped from them that they rise up to stop him (e.g. by passing a bill to end the state of emergency and having a 2/3 majority in both the House and Senate to override Trump’s veto, akin to what happened in South Korea recently).

Or he may just bloviate about the Panama Canal and Canada and Greenland and deportations and taxes and his cabinet nominations and whales and windmills and sharks and electric boats and the water pressure in his shower and dither around in a fairly rudderless way, per his previous administration and, frankly, the bulk of administrations generally. I’m praying for the latter.

katsden: Tristan, i appreciate your writings… greatly. as “democracy” from Greek means ‘of the people’ yet ‘of the money’ or capitalocracy is the prevalent mode, how do those of us in “lower and poverty” income get acknowledged as actual members with inherent equality?

Organize, organize, organize. Host a coffee. Host another. Get your friends and neighbors and colleagues and anyone else you can find. Join other organizations. Anyone who can join or start a union should do so. Unify, unify, unify.

One of the fundamental dynamics of politics is that concentrated interests usually defeat dispersed interests. Even a small but unified cluster can defeat the mass of the people — witness what the NRA has done even though 80% of Americans want to see more gun safety laws.

We need to unify around core economic issues like healthcare and wages and workers’ rights, and demand straightforward change. Very few people understand what a “tax credit” is. People know what a higher minimum wage would mean — and they support it!

I’ll be returning to all of these thoughts more soon.

Katie G: Your Substack about the Russia influence on Trump and SIMBY had me thinking a lot today. What do you think we can do about this broligarchy cabal aside from violent revolution?

I think the most important thing is not to lose heart. Or nerve. Or guts. Or any of those other bodily metaphors.

We need to keep fighting and pushing. There is a lot of hand-wringing as though Democrats got completely wiped out in 2024. We did not. It was a very close election.

We need to organize and build right now so we can fight the administration — and be ready for 2026 and 2028.

And our compatriots in other countries will need to do the same. South Korea understood the assignment. Hopefully enough Germans will realize that a right-wing takeover of their country will be a terrifying reversion to the past — and an open door for Russian domination. And hopefully enough Canadians will realize that a vote for “Canada First” is actually a vote for Trumpism and American bullying.

Maggie: How much trouble do you believe us old farts, living on SSI (or, in my case, SSDI), are actually going to be in?

The past pattern has been that Republican majorities change rules around the edges of Social Security that definitely cause damage to people — but the bulk of the system remains intact. That is still the default, the base case.

But could they try to go further than that this time? As will be the case with many government actions, Trump cannot legally go forward without congressional approval. So he will have two paths: (1) try to bully and cajole Congress to go his way, or (2) ignore the law and issue an executive order doing the thing he cannot legally do.

Given the very narrow House GOP majority — and the number of representatives who would rightly fear that destroying Social Security would mean political suicide — I doubt that option #1 would work for Trump. Critically, though, we will all need to be extremely loud with our opposition in order for Social Security to be defended. And we also need to be extremely loud in promoting the correct information on Social Security — that it is separate from the general fund and not part of the deficit or debt, and that the system is solvent. Right-wing and centrist fearmongers have been prophesying the future demise of Social Security for my entire adolescent and adult life, and lo and behold, none of those predictions were correct! Neither was Y2K. Neither was the Mayan apocalypse.

As for option #2 above, if Trump tries to privatize or sunset Social Security by executive order, he will be met with a court challenge — and hopefully an immediate injunction to halt everything pending a full trial and appeal — and I believe he would ultimately lose.

Yet that does not mean we can be complacent. We will need to be vigilant — and ready to swing into action.

kbelle: What happens when Justice Alito refuses to recuse himself on the Trump motion?

Which of course he will not. He is a brazen extremist who thinks he’s untouchable and special and above the law. He will also go down in history as one of the most notoriously corrupt and unscrupulous political hacks ever to sit on the Court.

But to answer your question: nothing will happen to him. At first. Insanely, while there is a federal law mandating recusal whenever a judge’s impartiality can reasonably be questioned, and there is also a judicial canon on the same subject, there is no enforcement mechanism to apply any of these to a Supreme Court justice. Yet.

It is incumbent on us to howl every time we see these gross acts of corruption, to catalog them, to call them out — and then we need to play the long game.

For example, while a subpoena from the Senate Judiciary Committee the last two years would have been filibustered, a future subpoena from the House Judiciary Committee would have no such obstacle. Take back the House in 2026, and we can finally begin to clean up the disgusting corruption that has infected our highest court.